Joseph Is Falling

The heave in the sidewalk was insurmountable. Joseph struggled for purchase on the edge of a cliff, warriors massed behind him and the sea below.

“She thought you were dead,” Joseph said. “She thought you were shot.”

Zap crouched by Joseph’s chair, rubbing his hands. No blood. Their eyes were level and Zap’s eyes were dark.

“Is that what you want to do to her?” Joseph said.

“Were you shot?” Zap said. “Is that why you’re in that chair?”

“She thought you were dead,” Joseph said again.

He could not seem to say what he wanted to say.

“She’s just a little kid,” he said.

And then there was Enzo, standing beside the two of them, taller than the sitting Joseph and the crouching Zap. It had come to pass; something in her had changed. She stood before them, a child filled with poison. The beekeeper had neglected his job.

“I am not a little kid,” the little kid said.

She turned to Zap. “And I don’t care if you are dead.”

She pointed her clickster at him. Click.

“Die,” she said.

She pointed the clickster at Joseph. Click.

“Walk.”

Joseph sat in his chair. Enzo kept on clicking. Click. Click. Click.

“Get up,” she said. “You’re unparalyzed.”

Joseph shook his head.

“Get up! You’re unparalyzed now. Don’t you hear me?”

“News flash, you stupid little kid,” Zap said. “He’s in that chair for good.”

“Shut up,” Enzo said, and pointed the clickster at Zap again. “You’re dead.”

And Joseph reached up and grabbed the clickster from Enzo’s hand and drove its lead into his thigh. He took his hand away and the clickster stayed upright, blood welling through the hole punched through his jeans. “What did I tell you,” Joseph said. “No pain.”

Enzo’s fingers hovered and flickered above the clickster like spiders trying to trap the desperate fly, but the desperate fly was dead. Sometimes things happened that he didn’t think were possible to happen. He looked down from a great height, and the warriors behind him grew closer. They were on their way. They would not be deterred.

Joseph opened his eyes and shook his head at Zap and Enzo, sworn enemies crouching before him in his wheelchair. There were no words. No words gave expression to what he felt inside him, what he felt in his dead legs that had no feeling. The bees had no voice and neither did he.

“This is all we get,” Joseph said. “Can’t either of you see that?”

Enzo and Zap were still and silent and watching him. Joseph felt his own struggle for words as a physical presence among them. It was so hard in this world to say what you meant. He stood at the edge of the cliff with the blue blue water far below. The warriors wanted what they wanted, and what they wanted was Joseph, broken and tumbling through the sky to the boulder that heaved itself from the heaving sea.

Where was the superhero?


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